But one analyst is claiming that “soft” implies a cushion -and that reports of an advertising falloff have been greatly exaggerated.

In a report called “Are Advertising and Media Falling Out of Bed?” Salomon Smith Barney’s Tobias Levkovich wrote that advertising and mainstream media are in decent shape.

Last year was a banner year that no-one expected to repeat, he told The Post last week. Aside from dot-com ads, the industry benefited from the seasonal events of the election and the Olympics. This year, advertising will grow more slowly -but it will still grow.

“If the growth rate of ad spending were to slow below 3 percent, we’d start to get worried,” he said. “But we don’t believe that’s going to happen.”

In the report, Levkovich wrote that ad spending growth typically exceeds consumer sales growth. He quotes IPG’s claim that over the past five years, auto and truck ad dollars have grown 62 percent while consumer light vehicle sales have grown just 12 percent.

It’s a different economic climate today, Levkovich admitted, but said consumer spending hasn’t been driving the economy the last few years -it’s been capital spending.

And he thinks consumers, emboldened by rate cuts, are exactly who will get us out of the mess we’re in.

“The way you get people to consume is to put the idea in front of them,” he said. “The sky isn’t falling. Historically, the sky hasn’t fallen.”

In his view, the dot-com blowout has been blown out of proportion: “A number of the Internet business models were structured on advertising revenue stream. Obviously, that has slowed down a lot, and that has not gone unnoticed.”

But traditional media is structured differently -and doesn’t rely much on dot-com dollars. He said ‘Net companies are only a minute proportion of the $650 billion advertising business; They’ll account for just 4 percent of AOL Time Warner’s ad revenues, for example.

NBC sources have blamed layoffs on the soft ad market, but Levkovich said NBC is a special case. Unlike ABC and CBS, the network doesn’t have a production studio and movie house so has to buy its programming. Ad-rich reruns cost it money.

“You can literally print money in syndication, and NBC owns very, very little of its content,” Levkovich said.

On his recommended list: AOL Time Warner; Disney, a broad-based, “nice, wholesome entertainment company”; Gemstar, which is “sitting at the epicenter of Internet, cable and satellite”; and Interpublic Group, which has diversified its businesses and now has less than half its revenues exposed to advertising.

Is Levkovich correct about all this?

Consumer spending isn’t in the dumps. The holiday shopping season was the slowest in a decade, but this month retailers reported unexpectedly good sales, as did General Motors and DaimlerChrysler.

Paul Holmes, editor and publisher of the Holmes Report, said big ad agencies have insulated themselves from recession by branching out over the last decade into related businesses like public relations. He said ad giant Omnicom now has three of the top 10 PR brands while Interpublic has two of the world’s biggest.

But at Advertising Age, Deputy Editor Bradley Johnson was less confident.

He agreed that “2000 was an anomaly in every respect” and said forecasters expect advertising to still have modest growth in 2001. But he pointed out there’s are hiring freezes at media giants like News Corporation (which owns The Post), and that AOL Time Warner just ditched three magazines. He said ad agencies are firing workers or losing them through attrition because “there’s simply less work to be done.”

Johnson produced a decade of statistics that showed advertising and the economy move in synch, and said “the ad market is a barometer of the general economy.”

To boot, he said that this is only the third year since the first Super Bowl in 1967 that its average ad rate will be flat or down. “If you want a piece of evidence about how soft the ad market is,” he said, “that’s it.”